


Like Friends Do

by 23Murasaki



Series: (re)Written!Verse [7]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alcohol, Bad Decisions, Content Warning: Ethan Being Himself, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, because you can pry that headcanon from my cold dead hands, implied past Giles/Ethan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 03:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12855708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: After the events ofIt's the Word, Rupert Giles is drowning his sorrows. And drowning in them. Luckily one of his old friends is in town to "help".(AKA: Relationship drama has happened, Ethan and Giles get sloshed and talk about everything but feelings.)





	Like Friends Do

**Author's Note:**

> So, er, this fic is saved on my laptop as TheseASSHOLES.docx. I think it's an apt description.

Rupert is not entirely sure how long he has spent alternating between being drunk and being hungover, but he is clean out of liquor. And that means his drunk is edging into hungover with no way to fix it. 

Ripper has two words for the concept of hangovers: Bugger. That. And bugger sobriety too, on a lesser scale. He’d been considering it, only then there’d been bloody hysterical women and he’d gotten punched for his troubles. 

The worst part is that he’s is almost entirely certain he deserved it. Some part of him knows full well that this is a spiral, this is ridiculous, he needs to stop this right now and pull himself together, because if he breaks so easily then Jenny had every right, every right, to walk out his door and not look back.

The second worst part of all of this is that it doesn’t feel nearly as bad as it should. Downward spirals are pretty familiar territory. They feel almost like home. 

Of course she said no. Of course she left. Of course Joyce-bloody-Summers took a swing at him — some part of his mind recalled that it had been a trained swing, a boxer’s attack, where had she picked up something like that?—and of course his Slayer had followed her mother out the door. Why wouldn’t they?

Why wouldn’t they now that they’d all seen what he really was? The kind of man who would turn on someone he loved in a heartbeat, the kind of man who would attack his own student for turning her back… And that is all the Watcher’s Council, isn't it? That is what Watchers are supposed to be able to do—Eliminate a problem without batting an eye. 

Only Jenny isn't a problem to be eliminated. Jenny is the best thing that has happened to him in…in his lifetime. He loves her, he loves her, and he’s gone and eliminated any chance of ever…anything. Any chance of anything, beyond the cold analysis and ink of the Watcher’s Council, has left his life along with her, and he really has only himself to blame. 

A knock on the door does not jerk him out of his spiral of self-pity. The knock just sort of lingers on the edges of his spiral of self pity but doesn’t do anything to pull him out. He doesn’t move from his place on the ground, partially due to despair and partially due to the fact that everything hurts on a purely physical level too.

The door opens anyway. 

“Ripper? You need better locks.”

“Piss off,” he growls. His throat is dry. At least the open door doesn’t come with bright lights. Is it night again? Is it night still? He doesn’t want Ethan in his apartment. He doesn’t really want Ethan in his life at all. 

“Well, this feels just like old times, doesn’t it?” Ethan asks lightly, dropping onto Ripper’s pile of blankets and couch cushions. “Something’s amiss, I’m having a grand old time, and you’re drinking and getting teary-eyed.”

“Piss. Off.” He glares at Ethan, who settles down cross-legged and starts sorting through bottles. “Leave. Exit the premises. Begone.”

“And leave you to stew in it? Please. You smell and you’re out of alcohol, by the way, so you’re not even doing the fun sort of stewing.” 

“Go away.” Rupert has read somewhere that insanity could be defined as repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting a different result. 

“Nope!” says Ethan. He’s building a bottle tower and grinning like Christmas has come early. Or…whatever chaos-worshiping wankers celebrated nowadays.

“… Fine.” He can’t argue with Ethan. He’s never been able to argue with Ethan. Fight him, bully him, throw him around? Sure. Argue? Not so much. And he is in no fit state to punch anyone’s teeth in. He’s just going to ignore Ethan until he goes away, so he pulls the first thing he can grab — a cushion—over his head and and turns away. There’s maybe a minute of silence.

“Riiiiiipper, are you just going to lie there all night?” He can feel Ethan’s breath on his neck, so he aims a weak punch in that general direction. 

“Leave me alone, for pity’s sake.” The punch doesn’t connect. Ethan laughs, low and almost gentle. 

“You’re a mess.”

“Yes, I’m well aware. Go away.”

“You know I won’t.” Ethan’s moving something around as he talks. “So, we can sit here and you can mope while I torment you in various creative ways–“ Ethan’s hands linger at his waist, and this time his punch connects. “–Ow. See, you’re not that despondent, are you?”

“What part of ‘get out of my flat’ is so difficult for you to grasp?” Rupert grumbles, forcing himself into a marginally more upright position. Better for glaring. Ethan, infuriatingly, smiles at him. 

“You know what, Ripper?” he says, and just for a second it’s like they’re sixteen again, on the edge of something terribly stupid. “Make me.”

Rupert has a half-baked plan to ride a wave of Ethan-induced anger long enough to shove him out the door, lock it, and pass out on a bed rather than the floor, but instead he makes it to his feet, sways, and knocks down Ethan’s bottle tower with a clang and a clatter loud enough to make him want to sit back down. Ethan catches him by the belt loops. 

“None of that now,” he chides, and Rupert is too woozy to hit him again. “The first step’s the hardest.” Rupert wants to say ‘go die’ and ‘let me go’ at the same time, but doesn’t really succeed.

“Let me die.” Well, that’s not exactly off the mark either, frankly. 

“None of that either,” says Ethan, annoyingly soothing and annoyingly close. “If I wanted you dead, believe me, I’d have killed you already. Take a breath now…”

It’s easy to just listen. Downward spirals feel familiar the way Ethan feels familiar, and he’s too tired and to angry at himself and at the world to fight it, so he lets Ethan guide him around his flat and undo his shirt. His skin feels numb, even when Ethan brushes a kiss against his forehead and—lets him go. 

“Take a shower. You’ll feel better. And smell better, have I mentioned that?” Git.

“You’re a git,” he says. Ethan sweeps a melodramatic bow. 

“At your service. Now shower.” 

He doesn’t want to shower. The bathroom has Jenny’s toothbrush and her spare comb and there a whole bottle of her sandalwood-scented conditioner in the shower itself. She’d left without a backward glance, and after what he’d said to her he’d be lucky if she even looked at him again.

“You have six of the same shirt and they’re all ugly!” Ethan yells from down the hall.

“Piss off!” he yells back, then winces. His head is still throbbing and his throat is still dry. Glass of water. Shower. Teeth. Clean clothes. Then throwing Ethan out of his flat.

Somehow he winds up getting talked into going out instead.

“Hair of the dog that bit you,” says Ethan. “And it wouldn’t kill you to enjoy yourself a bit, either.”

“Oh, so you think they serve the happy type of alcohol?” he snaps. He can’t focus on what’s wrong and what Ethan is saying at the same time, which is probably a sign that he needs less to drink rather than more, actually. He needs to be aware of–

Ethan is a hairsbreadth away from his face again, and Ripper’s reaction times really aren’t what they used to be because he just stares uncomfortably for a few seconds. Ethan grins plants a kiss on his forehead again.

“Yes, Ripper, I will bloody well find you the happy kind of alcohol,” he says. “Promise.”

————

He’s not sure whether it’s happy alcohol, but there’s a steady supply of it. Ethan is laughing and footing the bill, and talking enough for the two of them—some new contract including cursed artifacts from Xi’an, someone else with a possessed doll, Deidre has a new job— oh, and did he hear about the lawnmower that moved on its own and tried to hunt children?

“That’s—that’s terrible,” he says, not quite lucid enough to wrap his mind around the concept but certainly lucid enough to be disturbed by it. 

“Singer took it out—remember him? With the hat?” Rupert does not, in fact, remember the first thing about Singer or his hat, but that doesn’t matter. “Fought a lawnmower and won, that one! So now it’s just another story.” Ethan grins widely. “And honestly, I think it’s a bloody hilarious one. Ripper, Ripper just imagine you’re out one night, and you expect to get vampires or something, right? Only to hear something approach through the shadows sounding like bvrrrrr…!”

It’s really not that funny. Rupert rather prides himself on having a mature sense of humor and not laughing at puns or sound effects. 

He still laughs so hard Ethan has to help him out of the bar, and the summer air hits his face like something that could probably be described better if he was sober. Jenny would laugh at him if he told her that, and–

Oh god, Jenny.

He’s not sure when he allowed himself to cry either, but within moments he’s sobbing like some sort of bloody woman on Ethan’s shoulder. He hasn’t cried like this in years, not since…long before. Watchers are meant to approach their problems without emotion, without attachment, but he can’t do that, he can’t. He never could. 

“Oh Ripper, you really are a disaster,” Ethan murmurs, but does’t push him away or taunt him or try anything. “You always cry. At least your precious Jenny does something useful with her heartbreak.”

He opens his mouth to say ‘you saw Jenny?’ or something similar, but the world is already blurry at the edges and suddenly Ethan looks very far away, so the utterly practical part of Rupert’s mind kicks in.

“You drugged me,” he accuses. 

“Well, yes. Obviously,” says Ethan, and then everything goes black.

**Author's Note:**

> And we'll be back on schedule with the main fic starting on Thursday. Cheers, all!


End file.
